William HarrelBrother MFC-J6945DW INKvestment Tank Color Inkjet All-In-One PrinterThe Brother MFC-J6945DW is a wide-format color inkjet all-in-one printer that prints well and is feature-packed and inexpensive to use, making it an exceptional value for small offices.

The Brother MFC-J6945DW is a wide-format color inkjet all-in-one printer that prints well and is feature-packed and inexpensive to use, making it an exceptional value for small offices.

The Brother MFC-J6945DW ($349.99) is a light- to medium-duty wide-format all-in-one inkjet printer designed for small-office use. Like its predecessor, the Editors' Choice Brother MFC-J6935DW, it can not only print, but also copy, scan, and fax tabloid-size pages and comes with a generous paper-input capacity. The cherry on top is that it prints quite well and at a very reasonable cost per page. All of these perks add up to an easy Editors' Choice for the MFC-J6945DW.

A Wide-Format Stalwart

Measuring 14.9 by 22.6 by 18.8 inches (HWD) and weighing 53.1 pounds, the MFC-J6945DW is very close to the same size and weight as its predecessor, as well as similar in size to its closest competitors. The HP OfficeJet Pro 7740 Wide Format All-in-One, for example, is less than an inch larger in size all the way around and weighs about 10 pounds less than the MFC-J6945DW, while Epson's WorkForce WF-7720 Wide Format All-in-One is just slightly larger and weighs about 3 pounds less. Keep in mind, though, that the Epson model supports not only tabloid-size (11-by-17-inch)media but also super-tabloid (13-by-19-inch) paper.

The MFC-J6945DW's paper capacity is, like its predecessor's, a copious 600 sheets, split between two 250-sheet drawers up front and a 100-sheet multipurpose tray on the back. All three auto-duplexing paper sources support up to tabloid-size sheets, as does the 50-sheet single-pass duplexing automatic document feeder (ADF). It has a maximum monthly duty cycle of up to 30,000 pages, with a recommended monthly print volume of 2,000 pages. Its paper capacity and duty cycle figures beat all of its competition mentioned here.

You can make configuration changes and set up and execute walkup functions from the MFC-J6945DW's spacious and easy-to-use control panel, shown below.

And you can monitor your AIO, generate reports, and make configuration changes from a built-in secure (HTTPS) website, dubbed Web Config, shown in the photo below.

From the Status page, for instance, you can view ink levels graphically and by approximate remaining pages, as well as paper drawer levels. Notice also the Internal Ink Reservoir level status indicators, which tell you how much ink you have left to work with.

Copious Connections

The MFC-J6945DW's standard interfaces are Ethernet, near field communication (NFC), USB 2.0, Wi-Fi, and Wi-Fi Direct. NFC and Wi-Fi direct are peer-to-peer network protocols for connecting mobile devices to the printer without either them or it being connected to an intermediary network or router. Mobile connectivity, including these two peer-to-peer protocols, is extensive. Third-party solutions include Apple AirPrint, Google Cloud Print, and Mopria, or you can connect your mobile devices directly to the printer with Brother's iPrint&Scan.

Brother's Web Connect cloud services allow you to connect directly to both the personal and business iterations of Box, Dropbox, Evernote, Google Drive, OneDrive, and OneNote. Other Brother cloud apps include Office Print (for printing from mobile and 365 versions of Microsoft Office), Scan to Office (for scanning to mobile and online versions of Microsoft Office), Scan to Mobile, Cloud Secure Print, and Easy Scan to Email. And if all that is not enough, you can always go old-school and scan to and print from a USB thumb drive via the port on the left side of the chassis.

Tank Within a Tank

All four of the major inkjet printer makers—Brother, Canon, Epson, and HP—offer some kind of ink-cost-savings program. With the debut of the MFC-J995DW a few months ago, Brother released a new version of its program dubbed INKvestment Tank Extended Print, or INKvestment Tank for short. INKvestment Tank is an amalgam between a standard cartridge system and an onboard tank configuration. You still buy and replace cartridges when you're low on ink, but the cartridges offload into internal secondary tanks.

Between the external cartridges and internal tanks, the printer holds a lot of ink. Rather than displaying those highly inaccurate ink volume indicators, INKvestment Tank counts how many pages you have printed and estimates how many you have remaining. And, much like HP's Instant Ink program, the printer monitors the ink levels, notifies you when they're low, and then offers to order replacement cartridges directly from the control panel or the machine's onboard website.

Brother says that the new, reengineered ink cartridges that come with the printer provide up to a year of ink. That's based on a formula of 300 prints per month, 60 percent monochrome pages and 40 percent color pages. Frankly, if that's all you plan to print each month, you probably don't need this much printer. As you'll see momentarily, though, combined with its volume ratings, the MFC-J6945DW is capable of churning out well beyond those meager numbers.

Solid Performance

Brother rates the MFC-J6945DW at 22 pages per minute (ppm). I tested it over Ethernet from our standard Intel Core i5-equipped testbed PC running Windows 10 Professional. At 18.3ppm, the MFC-J6945DW churned at 3.7ppm slower than its rating. That's the same score we got from its predecessor, the MFC-J6935DW, last year, and 5.3ppm slower than the HP 7740. It beat the Epson WF-7720, though, by just less than 4ppm. While these speeds are suitable for most offices with light- to medium-duty output requirements, if your office or workgroup needs faster, higher-volume printing and copying from a wide-format machine, Epson also offers the Editors' Choice WorkForce Pro WF-C8690 (at a significantly higher purchase price), which turned in a score of 10ppm higher than the MFC-J6945DW on this portion of our tests.

Next, I printed several colorful Acrobat, Excel, and PowerPoint documents containing complex charts, graphs, and other business graphics, and then combined those scores with the results from printing the above 12-page text document. This resulted in a rate of 12.2ppm. Here, the MFC-J6945DW fell behind the WF-7720 by 2.2ppm and beat the HP 7740 by about 2.5ppm. The higher-end Epson WF-C8690, on the other hand, managed a respectable 6.6ppm faster than the MFC-J6945DW.

It's important to note, though, that the above scores derive from printing letter-size pages, not wide-format output. Tabloid-size pages, which contain twice the surface area than letter-size media does, should take about twice as long to print, and super-tabloid pages should take a bit longer than that.

Quality Output and Low Overhead

The MFC-J6945DW produces excellent text for an inkjet, average graphics, and great-looking photos, especially for a four-ink business model (compared with a five- or six-ink photo printer, that is).

This AIO's text output should be more than good enough for most business applications. Graphics come out with solid fills and gradients that flow evenly from one color or tint to the next. And, in addition to brilliantly and accurately colored photos, the MFC-J6945DW supports borderless output up to letter-size, allowing you to print documents and images that look as though they were professionally designed and reproduced. I have no complaints about the MFC-J6945DW's output.

As one of Brother's INKvestment Tank models, at 1 cent for monochrome pages and 5 cents for color prints, the MFC-J6945DW costs less to use than most printers in this class, especially wide-format models. Not even the higher-volume Epson WF-C8690 mentioned above, at 1.6 cents black and 6.7 cents color, delivers running costs that low.

You Can't Go Wrong

As we said about its predecessor, there's not much to dislike about this printer. It's fast enough, prints very well, delivers reasonable running costs, and comes with just about every productivity and convenience feature available. (It does lack Bluetooth, but compensates with Wi-Fi Direct and NFC.) Brother does no corner-cutting here, and it pays off, making the MFC-J6945DW an easy Editors' Choice for a light- to moderate-duty wide-format AIO.

About the Author

William Harrel is a contributing editor focusing on printer and scanner technology and reviews. He has been writing about computer technology since well before the advent of the internet. He has authored or coauthored 20 books—including titles in the popular "Bible," "Secrets," and "For Dummies" series—on digital design and desktop publishing softw... See Full Bio

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